Sotheby’s takes Mark Weiss to court over contested Frans Hals: The auction house has started proceedings in English High Court to recover its losses in the sale of a work that was deemed a forgery after technical testing.

What Geneva’s Art King Lost in Battle With Russian Billionaire: “When something like this happens in your life, your outlook on life and on people changes, as do your priorities,” Bouvier said in an interview. Bouvier, a minority shareholder in the Geneva Free Ports, created a network of tax-free art storage warehouses in Singapore and Luxembourg while discreetly acquiring dozens of works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet and Amedeo Modigliani to sell to Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev. Then, in February 2015, he was arrested on fraud charges by a team of eight Monaco police officers outside a seafront mansion owned by the Russian.

Prosecution seeks jail time and heavy fines for Paris museum thieves: Heavy sentences were sought at the trial of three men involved in the 2010 burglary of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, when five masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Modigliani and Léger, valued at a combine €108m, were taken and subsequently vanished.

Will Sotheby’s Sell a Trove of Impressionist Paintings Locked in Storage for Decades?: Sotheby’s may soon offer a collection of more than two dozen works by blue-chip painters such as Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh, if the legal efforts of a partial owner prove successful in court.

IVORY DEBATE: UK ministers not convinced that extending ban to pre-1947 antiques would save elephants: The government remains open-minded on proposals to extend its planned ban on trade in post-1947 ivory to antiques with ivory dating before this time, despite pressure from some MPs to do so.

UK government plans gallery for its off-duty art: The UK’s Government Art Collection (GAC) plans to set up its own gallery. This will open up a huge collection of 14,000 works, mainly by British artists, which is not easily accessible.

Brexit Economic Slump Scuttles National Gallery’s Effort to Buy Pontormo Painting: London’s National Gallery has raised the £30 million ($37.35 million) needed to purchase Jacopo Pontormo’s Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap from American buyer J. Tomilson Hill, the billionaire vice chairman of hedge fund giant the Blackstone Group, but the fall in the value of the British pound in the wake of Brexit has put the arrangement in jeopardy.

The Art Loss Register Resolved Eight Stolen Artworks Cases in January: The Art Loss Register (ALR) has announced that it ended January with a total of eight recovery cases resolved. Three of the eight artworks that were recovered were stolen during the Second World War.

Actor David Spade Sues Photographer Peter Beard for Failure to Authenticate a Work: In an unusual case that marks the second time in recent years that an artist has been pressured over a failure to authenticate a work, actor David Spade has filed a lawsuit against photographer Peter Beard, his wife Nejma, and former Beard dealer Peter Tunney over a work he purchased 15 years ago and is currently trying to sell.

Auction Sales Down at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips, in a Challenging 2016: Christie’s sold 4 billion pounds of art and collectibles in 2016, the international auction house said on Thursday, a decline of 16 percent from the previous year.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Goes Open Access With 375,000 Images: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is making all public domain works in its collection available online for both scholarly and commercial purposes.

Hermitage storage centre searched by FSB agents: Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, has played down concerns about a search earlier this week of a museum facility by the Federal Security Service (FSB).

Former South Korean Culture Minister Charged With Abuse of Power Over Artist Blacklist: Former South Korean culture minister Cho Yoon-sun and former chief of staff Kim Ki-choon were formally charged with abuse of power and coercion on Tuesday, the former for creating a secret blacklist of artists, and the latter for spearheading the project and enforcing it.

17th century painting looted by Nazis returned to Max and Iris Stern Foundation: A 17th century painting stolen by the Nazis during World War Two and recovered by the FBI in 2015 has been returned to the Max and Iris Stern Foundation based at Montreal’s Concordia University.

UNESCO Builds Cultural Center at the Site of Destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas: A planned cultural center at the site of the lost Buddhas of Bamiyan, in Afghanistan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, is underway thanks to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

On 19 January 2017, ArtTactic launched the inaugural South Asian Art Market Report 2017 in Mumbai. The Report addresses key trends in the South Asian art market at what is a truly exciting time in its growth and development. Constantine Cannon LLP are delighted to partner with ArtTactic for this project, and have contributed to the Report an analysis of the ways in which South Asian artists can go about protecting their legacy, an issue that is of great importance to artists worldwide.

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